Ai

Last time we did one of these short film round-ups, we gathered 10 shorts all under 10 minutes. This time, we’ve got seven creator-submitted shorts, most of which run a little longer, but all of which tell some wonderfully twisted tales. So be careful who you go home with, beware that wormhole, and seriously...don’t eat that pizza! Read More >>

Technologists like to put machine learning on a pedestal, exalting its ability to complement and even exceed human labour, but these systems are far from perfect. In fact, they are still tremendously vulnerable to self-owns. A research paper from January details how just how easy it is to trick an image recognition neural network. Read More >>

In the absence of proactive tools to prevent dirtbags from nonconsensually uploading intimate photos to the internet, victims of revenge porn have little surefire recourse to ensure the photos stop circulating online. It’s an exhausting and devastating game of whack-a-mole, and even when images are effectively scrubbed, the damage has been done. That’s why Facebook’s announcement today that it’s ramping up its program to police nonconsensual image-sharing feels like a glimmer of hope in the fight against revenge porn. Read More >>

“Don’t read the comments” has become a common maxim among anyone who has spent any meaningful time online – it means that, if you go sifting through online comments, you’re going to see some shit. A new experimental tool from Google is trying to give users more power over what they do and don’t see – as it stands, it seems nice in concept but still pretty futile in reality. Read More >>

Last month, the US Army put out a call to private companies for ideas about how to improve its planned semi-autonomous, AI-driven targeting system for tanks. In its request, the Army asked for help enabling the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS) to “acquire, identify, and engage targets at least 3X faster than the current manual process.” But that language apparently scared some people who are worried about the rise of AI-powered killing machines. And with good reason. Read More >>

Welcome to AIstrology. With the help of research scientist Janelle Shane, we built a bot to generate monthly horoscopes. Each horoscope below is a prediction based on a wealth of predictions for each sign; a distillation of what the stars have in store for you this month. Read More >>

In a split second before you reach to pick up an object, your brain pre-calculates all the movements needed to safely reach and grasp it securely. It’s a subconscious approach that’s the result of years of childhood development and learning, and one that robotics researchers are now using for their own creations. Festo’s new BionicSoftHand is not only remarkably dextrous, but using AI, it figures out how to properly hold and manipulate an object before it makes any actual movements. Read More >>

According to Oral-B there's a very good chance you're not brushing your teeth properly. Either you're missing bits, or you're being way too forceful with keeping your chompers clean - which makes sense considering we've all been conditioned to apply plenty of elbow grease when we clean other things. So now there are toothbrushes, apps, and artificial intelligences designed to help you improve, and Oral B has both coming later this year. Read More >>

It could be much easier to pull off the perfect heist than you think. According to a new study from the UK, you don’t need to disguise yourself much in order to fool the average person into thinking they’re looking at someone else. It might even take as little as a goth makeover. Read More >>

In December of last year, Rolling Stone reported that at a Taylor Swift concert at the 2018 Rose Bowl there was a mysterious kiosk playing clips of the singer that doubled as a facial recognition system to flag any of Swift’s stalkers. A number of reports covered the alleged kiosk – including Gizmodo – but little was known at the time about the surveillance system. But now we have answers to some key questions about this kiosk, including who was behind it. Read More >>

Researchers at the non-profit AI research group OpenAI just wanted to train their new text generation software to predict the next word in a sentence. It blew away all of their expectations and was so good at mimicking writing by humans they’ve decided to pump the brakes on the research while they explore the damage it could do. Read More >>

Welcome to AIstrology. With the help of research scientist Janelle Shane, we built a bot to generate monthly horoscopes, trained on about 3,500 extant readings as well as current monthly horoscopes. Each horoscope below is therefore a prediction based on a wealth of predictions for each sign; a distillation of what the stars have in store for you this month. Read More >>